Writer, blogger, troublemaker

Kiss me, I taste like brands

Well, here’s a strange new trend: branded lip products. I’m not sure why lips specifically, but first there was this:

Virgin Atlantic’s ‘Upper Class Red‘ lipstick, to promote their redesigned Upper Class cabins. All their stewardesses now wear it, they’re giving samples to everyone in Upper Class on the inaugural flight, and you can buy it, too. If you want.

Coca-Cola ‘Lip Happiness’ lip balms. They come in regular Coca-Cola, Cherry Coke and Vanilla Coke flavours and are on sale at Boots.

Then the other day, I picked these up:

A quid each in Primark. The height of class.

Now I’m obviously cheating slightly because these are Coke branded again (Sprite being one of Coke’s drinks) but still, it does seem like a bit of an influx. The Vanilla Coke and Sprite balms are pretty true to taste, but the Fanta one (not pictured) is a bit gross so I gave it away.

It seems like a fairly understandable move for a drinks brand to start creating products with their patented taste, but I’d be wary of putting out anything that doesn’t taste exactly right – the weird-tasting Fanta balm put me off the drink a bit. It was really obviously flavoured with that fake orange stuff used for so many ‘orange’ things, rather than whatever they use for Fanta. I also thought the balms were lacking something – maybe a tingle to emulate fizziness.

The Virgin Atlantic lipstick, on the other hand, is a great PR idea except that it reminds me of their ill-fated makeup brand, Virgin Vie. Their products were pretty rubbish and downgraded the whole Virgin brand in my eyes – I suppose that’s probably why they’ve teamed up with BareMinerals for this lippie. I wouldn’t buy it if I thought it was the same quality as the stuff they put out before, but from BareMinerals, I might.

It’s certainly an original way to promote an airline, and I think it works in this instance. Maybe no more branded lip products for a while now, though – that’s probably enough. We don’t everyone to get carried away with the whole branded lip thing and start doing stuff like this: